Contents

Tracking down segmentation faults

Compiling Gambit for debugging purposes

Download the latest Gambit sourcecode.

Unpack it, usually you do that through executing tar xvfz gambc-v4_X_X.tgz in your shell.

Run the configure script. It is normally compiled with --enable-single-host flipped on. If you want Gambit to dump internal messages to the file "console" in the current directory, also pass the --enable-debug parameter. To see all options, run ./configure --help.

Edit the file makefile using your favourite editor. There are at least two rows that contain the sequence -O1 (i.e. dash O one), in the current version that's the two rows starting with FLAGS_OBJ and FLAGS_DYN. Replace -O1 with -g -O0 . The -g option will make your C compiler include debugging symbols on compilation, and the -O0 will force it not to do any optimizations on the assembly/binary code it generates, thus the mapping of rows of C/C++ code into memory addresses during program execution will be the most precise your C/C++ compiler is capable of generating.

Compile Gambit through typing make

If you want this Gambit to replace your current installation, run make install

Running compile-file with debugging options flipped on

track-scheme to make the C/C++ compiler use the source Scheme code instead of the source C/C++ code for debugging info. This is an option that you may want to vary during debugging work.

keep-c to make compile-file not remove the intermediary C/C++ code file.

Run Gambit in GDB

From your shell, run

gdb gsc

GDB will start. If you want to pass gsc argument, type

set args=[the arguments]

for example

set args=-e "(display \"test\n\")" -

To start Gambit witihn GDB, type run.

If your Gambit application crashes, you will get a prompt in GDB indicating so. To get a backtrace of the stack of your program, type bt . The backtrace should also be interesting for anyone who would assist you in finding the reason to the crash.

To quit, type quit.

Other things you may want to do

There are ample of debug utilities, for different operating systems, that may be interesting for you to use.

For instance, strace is an utility that displays all Kernel invocations your application does. Remember to run it with the -Ff options.

valgrind is an utility that traces memory leaks. (Gambit will not leak memory in itself, but a faulty Foreign Function Interface library could do that.)